On Paper

It both bothers and fascinates me how people can be so different. And I don’t even mean that they’re different from each other. Of course they are. What I mean is, I think it’s very strange that people can be so different from their own selves.

To illustrate my point, I’d like to give some examples:

So my friend works for a magazine and is in charge of hiring interns. She receives resumes and writing portfolios from college students and once she received one that had a really interesting cover letter. She showed it to me and we were so entertained by the writing on the cover letter and sample works, we Googled him to see if there were other things he’d written that we could read on the Internet. There were. And they were all entertaining as they were insightful. I told her that she should definitely get him as an intern, and we even thought of setting him up on a date with my friend’s sister we were so impressed with his writing skills.

But then she actually met him for the interview and was a little disappointed. Where had the funny, witty and insightful guy gone? The person she talked to was shy, awkward and weird. “Like, the weird kind of weird, not the quirky and cute kind of weird,” she said.

We supposed he was nervous. It was a job interview, after all, and who ever is comfortable during these things? But still, it’s too bad that someone who showed so much promise on paper turned out to be very underwhelming in actuality.

In contrast, once while we were at a food fair, my friend and I met a guy who was cute, charming and really down-to-earth. He was already a business owner, but still insisted on being the one to serve the customers during food fairs. He said it was because he was relatively new to the business world and so he still had a lot to learn. And he bashfully admitted to pretending to know people in the industry in order not to look stupid when meeting new business contacts. And he made other jokes that were also funny.

“He seems like the kind of person who’d make a good friend,” my friend said. And so we stalked looked for him on Facebook. And we found out that he went to snobby schools, hung out at snobby places, had snobby hobbies and had snobby friends. The pictures told us we were looking at the right Facebook account. But the text and other information we could see, told us he was a completely different person from the nice, grounded, friendly guy we met.

It makes me wonder if people have a completely different impression of me if they only know me through Facebook or my other social media accounts or this blog. Or if they change their minds about me after they meet me once they see my social media accounts. I’ve been told that I write exactly the way I speak, but I’m not sure if it was meant as a compliment or not. Or maybe it was just a neutral observation. But I’d say that it’s kind of inaccurate because I definitely speak less English than I write. Although, I’d say that it’s also kind of accurate because I mostly say pointless things, in the same way that I mostly write pointless things.